Bibliometrics

Bibliometric analysis includes the use of data from citation counts and publication counts from peer reviewed journals and conferences. For bibliometrics, the more people are citing your work, the better academic impact you’re seen to have.

A disclaimer: It is bad practice to compare h-indexes and citation rates across academic fields.

The aim of the h-index is to measure both research outputs as well as academic impact. This way, someone who publishes a lot, does not have much impact does not get ahead on volume alone, and someone who has contributed only one paper with a lot of citations does not get an unfair advantage.

Your h-index is the number of publications you have, cross referenced for how many times those publications have been cited. You could have only ten papers, but if each of those papers had been cited ten or more times, your h-index is ten. If you have 80 papers, but only five of those have been cited five or more times, your h-index is five.

Altmetrics

Altmetrics measurements include the conversations around research, and include social media, views and downloads They are seen as a way to measure the engagement and attention your work has received. You can access the database Altmetric.com[5] via the library (sign in using your UTS details, and then use the Continue as a Guest tab).

In some disciplines, traditional bibliometrics are not a good measure of your research. If you are interested in seeing where your research is being reported on, the databases under the News Databases[6] are a good place to look.

Under the new definitions o research impact, researchers need to demonstrate the impact of their work on society. This could include government or organisational policy or practice, health procedure or improved patient outcomes, or legal precedent. If you need further information, we recommend you contact the Research and Innovation Office[7].

Managing your research profile allows you to take control of your professional identity and ensure that your work is discoverable and that you are promoting yourself and your research in the most efficient way.

ResearcherID[8] is a free service that provides researchers with their own ID number, free analysis of their publications, collaborative and citational analysis. This data is then fed into Web of Science to ensure that your work is accurately represented. Instructions:ResearcherID - Creating a new profile[9] (PDF).

Google Citations[10] is another free option that can be a better option for individuals who publish in areas that might not be well covered in Web of Science or in Scopus. Instructions:Google Citations[11] (PDF).

In Scopus[2] authors are given a unique “Author ID”. Despite this, occasionally there will be some ‘orphan’ records or publications that are not appearing with your Author ID. To fix these, search for your name, click it and then choose ‘Request author detail corrections'.Instructions:ScopusID[12] (PDF).

Impactstory [15]is a tool that builds an impact profile automatically based on both your traditional publications and emerging formats including blog posts, datasets and videos. Simply connect your Impactstory account with your existing accounts such as ORCID, slideshare, Twitter and Google Scholar. See pricing details[16].

The Library can provide advice on number of tools to support you in choosing where to publish. While they are useful, they should be balanced with advice from your colleagues, supervisor or faculty on the best ways to publish in your discipline.

A requirement of HERDC is that the University reports on its research income and publications to the Government in order ensure that research grants are allocated in a fair and transparent way and to support the policy intent of the funding.

ERA evaluates the quality of the research in Australian universities against national and international benchmarks. For your research to be used in the UTS ERA submission, you must publish in a journal in the ERA journal list. These are created by committees of expert researchers from both Australia and international institutions, and are a comprehensive collection of journals and conferences.

In order to fulfil HERDC and ERA requirements, after you publish, you will normally submit your journal article, conference paper, book chapter or other publication into the Research and Innovation Office’s Symplectic Elements[19].

On submitting your publication details via Symplectic Elements, deposit a copy of your work in OPUS[20], the institutional repository, to comply with the UTS Open Access Policy[21]. OPUS will digitally store your work for the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) process.

The two main points to take away from this are:

All research outputs should be reported to the Research and Innovation Office (RIO). RIO has much more detailed information about reporting requirements[22].

You should try to ensure that if you are publishing in a journal, it is in the ERA journals list. A good place to find current lists of ERA journals by subject area (known as Field of Research codes or FOR codes), or ability to search by title, or ISSN is John Lamp's ERA[23] site, as it is easier to navigate and search than the official version of the list.

In Scopus[2], there is an Analytics link that will take you to the Journal Analyzer. This tool allows you to compare and evaluate journals in your field. Once journals are identified, a series of charts analysing the following will be generated:

SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) score. This score comes from the number of citations received by the journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where the citations came from.

SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper). This score is determined by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in the subject field of the journal it was published in.

Citations – Total number of citations for the journal for all publications since 1996.

Documents – Total number of documents published per year for the journal.

Percent not cited – Documents that were not cited, per published year.

Percentage of review articles in that journal that were published each year.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR)[24] are a useful tool for discovering journals by subject category, and for evaluating journals using citation data. It Can be used to help understand which journals get the most citations per articles by showing you the journals have the highest number of citations per article, and how quickly those articles are cited. If you can publish in these journals, theoretically you will have a higher chance of being cited yourself.

It is possible to see lists of journals by categories, search for a known title, or view all journals included in JCR.

Search Tip:

It is important to remember to select either JCR Science Edition or JCR Social Sciences Edition from the left side of the page and then click ‘SUBMIT’ before you start searching. The term Social Sciences is extremely broad and is inclusive of areas like business, nursing, and criminology, although some are included in both Sciences and Social Sciences.

Once a title has been selected, the following useful information is available:

Total cites – Total number of citations for the journal for all publications since 1996.

Impact Factor - Calculated by dividing the number of citations in the year by the total number of articles published in the two years before.

5 Impact Factor – As above, only over a 5 year period.

Immediacy Index - how quickly articles in the journal are cited.

Cited Half-life – The median age of the journals that were cited in the year selected.

Issues/Year – How frequently the journal is published.

Journal Rank in Categories – How the journal is performing against other journals in the same subject area.

Ulrich's periodicals directory[25] is a database that is all about journals. Before you publish, do a quick search for the journal’s title. It will give you some basic information (description, how frequently it is published) as well as information about which database/s the journal is included in. This will help you know that if you publish in that journal, other academics will easily be able to find the article in the databases they regularly search. This will hopefully lead to more citations!

Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) have created Journal Review List[26] for business researchers. The have ranked the journals using the same A* - C rating system used by the original ERA journal list, allowing researchers to see at a glance the prestige of the journal.

As with ERA, John Lamp has created ABDC Journal Rankings Access,[27] a searchable (by title or ISSN) website that is easier to search than the official excel spreadsheet.

In this competitive environment, there are many tools and strategies researchers can adopt to promote their research and interact with scholarly communities around the world.

Many researchers are recognising the rapidly evolving role of social media in academic communication. Social media gives researchers a way to instantly connect and engage with communities around the world.

Blogging is an easy way to promote and communicate your research to the scholarly community, allowing you to test your ideas and gather feedback. It has an added benefit of sharing your work with the general public who often cannot easily access scholarly works.

Twitter[36] is a free micro-blogging service that uses short 140 character messages called tweets. You can use this to easily share information about your research, learn about what other researchers are doing and engage in conversation with other users. It is quite useful at conferences, where you can use twitter to join in the conversation, share links to your presentation and see what other people say about your paper.

The library runs a workshop[34] on using twitter for research and can offer individual research consultations. If you would like to get started straight away, Mashable[37] has a fantastic guide to twitter.

There are several social networking sites specifically designed for academics or industry professionals. These sites allow you to share your experience, link to your papers, keep a CV and find and follow your peers. Creating profiles on one or more of these sites make you and your research more findable, particularly if you don’t have an officialstaff profile at UTS (e.g. casuals and PhD students).

Presentations: Make your presentations easy to embed, share and view by uploading them on Slideshare[43]. This is particularly useful at conferences so people can have access to your information and presentation while they await your conference paper or journal article.

Pictures:Flickr[44] is a photo sharing site that allows you to show, embed and share your photos. You can choose how other people reuse your material by choosing the appropriate Creative Commons license[45].

Video: If your research is particularly visual, or is best explained in a visual way YouTube[46] and Vimeo[47] allow you to share videos, give advice and build community interest in your research. These sites make it easy for you and other people to share your videos on social media and embed in websites.

It is always important when you are making your work available to the public that you carefully consider any copyright, IP or commercialisation issues surrounding it. We highly recommend having a look at the following sites:

Open Access[50] - find out how you can easily share your work with a wider community

Privacy

With anything publically available online it is important to be careful with your private information. At the same time in order to be well known and promote your research you need to communicate about yourself and your work in the public arena. It’s about finding a balance. Some things to think about:

Investigate and understand the privacy settings on the tools you use.

While we don’t always recommend it, you can set up personal and private accounts to keep your work and home lives separate.

If you have any questions about this please feel free to contact a Librarian[35] to discuss privacy options and social media.